NASCAR drivers love this racetrack

Mich. Speedway plays host to Marketplace 400

August 17, 2003|By Ed Hinton, Tribune auto racing reporter.

BROOKLYN, Mich. — In the early years, Michigan International Speedway was such a departure from the Southern confines of the NASCAR tour that races were officially designated as the Yankee 600, and then Yankee 400.

This was a somewhat foreign audience to a group of drivers for whom the term "good ol' boys" was neither as hackneyed nor inaccurate as it is now.

Sunday's Marketplace 400 completes 35 seasons of NASCAR racing here, and the tradition has grown as rich as that of Charlotte, Atlanta and even Darlington, S.C. Michigan is the longest-running of the non-Southern venues and the most consistent success story outside the cradle region.

NASCAR packed the grandstands here in 1969, when capacity was only 29,983. And it will pack the 136,373 reserved seats Sunday, with an overflow crowd in the infield.

"This place has always sold all the tickets it had," said Benny Parsons, a Detroit native who began his NASCAR career in the first race here, went on to become a Winston Cup champion and is now a television commentator.

Parsons can't help chuckling at "everybody now talking about, `Wow! NASCAR racing is succeeding in the North! What kind of deal is that?' Well, NASCAR has always succeeded up here."

The attraction was, and is, mutual. From Richard Petty, David Pearson and Cale Yarborough then, to Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt Jr. now, Michigan has been deemed the purest drivers' track. The consensus, generation upon generation of drivers, is that Michigan is their favorite place to race.

Pearson, a South Carolinian who in retirement remains the winningest driver in the track's history, with nine victories, distinctly recalls the first outing on the wide, 2-mile, D-shaped track that had opened in 1968 for an Indy-car race.

"Smoothest track I'd ever been on in my life," was Pearson's first impression. "Still is, I reckon."

"It's the smoothest one we go to, still," Stewart said.

"But it was flat," Pearson thought warily at first sight. "We'd always run the banked tracks. And it being flat, we were all scared to run into the corners. We were afraid we'd spin out."

That was relative. Michigan's turns are banked 18 degrees, about average in the modern trend toward moderate corners. But Pearson and Co. had come from Atlanta and Charlotte, both banked 24 degrees, and Daytona's towering 31 degrees. And that same summer of 1969, they took to the 33-degree banking of Talladega.

"It was the first big, flat track we'd ever run on--and you ended up liking it better than you liked the banks," Pearson said.

Cale Yarborough won a slam-bang duel with Lee Roy Yarbrough in the Motor State 400. Later that summer, Pearson won the first Yankee 600 and was off to a record that only Bill Elliott among active drivers has approached. Elliott has seven victories here, including four straight in 1985-86.

It suits them all because there's so much room to roam, experiment, even make mistakes and recover from them.

Said Bobby Labonte, who'll start on the pole Sunday: "The groove is really wide. You can race from the white line [on the inside of the track] to the white wall [outside], which is about 100 yards. It's a long way up there."

Pearson fondly remembers that "it's wide enough that you can get into trouble and still straighten it up before you hit the wall."

Summed up the 68-year-old Pearson: "It's about the nicest track we run on."